The True Cost of Downtime

World’s largest manufacturers lose $1.5 trillion a year to production outages, as the cost of failure soars

The cost of downtime to large manufacturing and industrial organizations has rocketed since 2020, according to a new report from Senseye Predictive Maintenance, a Siemens AI-powered machine health- management platform.

The report reveals that unplanned downtime costs manufacturers at least 50 per cent more today than it did in the period 2019-20, due to spiraling inflation and production lines running at higher capacity. The cost of a lost hour now ranges from $39,000 for FMCG facilities to over $2 million in the automotive sector.

The cost of downtime has soared despite a 23% reduction in production line failures. Major manufacturers now experience 20 monthly unplanned downtime incidents per facility, six fewer than two years ago. But with each failure taking longer to recover from, they have only gained two additional hours of production capacity each month.

The report predicts unplanned downtime will cost Fortune Global 500 industrial companies almost $1.5 trillion this year, 11 per cent of their annual revenues. Previous research from 2019 to 2020 put the cost to these companies at $864 billion a year, around eight per cent of turnover.

Robert Russell, CTO and Co-Founder comments: It’s clear from our findings that downtime is getting more costly – much more costly. In every sector surveyed, an hour’s downtime costs significantly more than it did two years ago. This is a drag on profits that businesses can no longer afford to ignore.

“However, digitization and predictive maintenance efforts are starting to have a significant impact, and most manufacturers have successfully reduced the number of incidents affecting production.”

Jim Davison, South of England Region Director at Make UK, represents manufacturers in the UK and says, “Inflation is a big factor. Goods cost more, so the value of those not made during downtime is greater, and with many factories operating at higher capacity there is less slack in the system to make up for lost time. The higher cost of energy, labor and materials wasted when production lines fail also contributed to a perfect storm of costly downtime challenges for major manufacturers.

“What is clear is that predictive maintenance can play a crucial role in reducing costs and boosting productivity. Especially when manufacturers need to use every tool at their disposal to meet the demands of an ever-changing industry.”